Help with a new build - Intel platform

I put this here because I don't have total direction on what I'm going to do yet. I'm not sure what exactly I want or expect out of this build or exactly what I plan to do with it besides overclock it. I've made up my mind what I wanted and then changed my mind more times than you have fingers and toes. I'll try to list what I have so far and what I'm thinking about, this will probably take many directions so that is why I put it in the general section. I know it might get better or more responses if I had it in a better section, but here goes...

The case that I have is brand new, it's an Antec 900. I plan to go water cooling and have somewhat of a system put together already. I'm not totally sure anymore what the parts are but I bought them off this forum. At this point if they are really important to know I can figure out what I've got and post it but I don't think it's a major concern at this point, is it? The power supply is also an Antec...I believe it's about 650 watts but I have had thoughts of going bigger.

Well, that's it. That is what I actually have my hands on right now. So my starting point is the CPU and I'm leaning toward the Q9650. I had thought about the i7 but to me it's just too new right now and I don't really know much about it anyway. Plus I know I'm not looking for the newest and latest thing on the shelf either but I'm not above going that route. I just don't want to toss out the water cooling parts I have now if I don't have to.

So I'm thinking the Q9650 and then that leads me to which motherboard should I go with, I'm thinking the ASUS Rampage Extreme. I'm partly thinking this motherboard because it's northbridge is already set up for water cooling as I have no cooling block for a northbridge right now. It seems to have a lot of lights and options...bells and whistles...and I'm a sucker for that crap, the stuff that breaks down later and leaves you ticked off. But that is how I am.

So if I go with those two pieces so far then I have to have RAM for it, and I have no idea what is supported or what works best with this combo. I've read some of the reviews at NewEgg and some people aren't really happy with this board or it's soundboard either. The audio portion isn't a huge thing to me...it's something that I can change later on if needed. And when it comes to video cards...I know as much about them as I do shampoo. I'm not a huge gamer and I don't really do anything with video except watch it. I do play some games but not the high end stuff that most use to set the mark for video cards, so it doesn't have to be the biggest or best on the shelf either.

Now comes the part about how much RAM I want. If I want over 3 gigs then am I right assuming that I have to run a 64 bit operating system? If I do, then am I also right in assuming that there isn't a lot of support out for it along the lines of drivers and stuff like that? I'd like to have 4 to 6 gigs, I don't really think I'll ever need much more than that anytime soon.

And I haven't exactly decided what to do about hard drives either at this point. I've thought about running some in a RAID setup but the thought of sticking two 300 gig drives together and only seeing 150 gigs and one drive is kinda nerving to me for some reason. I thought about getting one 10,000 RPM drive to put my operating system on and then running some type of other drive for storage and stuff like that. I don't know much about hard drives either, so to me a hard drive is a hard drive. I'm not real concerned right this minute about a DVD drive or anything like that...I can kinda decide for myself what I want along those lines, the rest is Greek to me almost.

I know I want a fairly fast system and something that will be fairly reliable also. If it's slightly over-kill for my needs, that is ok too. If I end up with more computer than I can actually use or need...again that is ok too. That's about all I can say about what I want or expect out of it...so far anyway...so can anyone help me or point me where I need to go?

Thanks!

Lots of stuff to cover here. I won't be able to cover all of your questions. I don't know much about water cooling myself so someone else can help you with that. As for the CPU. The Q9550 or Q9650 would both be good options. They have large cache, high bus speeds, and a fairly large multiplier. They would both be good overclocking options; probably the best except for a Core 2 Extreme or a Core i7. I don't think the Q9650 would be a whole lot better than the Q9550, but if you can afford the nicer one it wouldn't hurt your overclocking potential.

For the motherboard, the Asus Rampage is a good option, but it wouldn't be that hard to get a northbridge water block and install it yourself. The northbridge shouldn't need to be water cooled anyway, as air cooling is usually adequate. But, again, it won't hurt. There are plenty of other good motherboards available too. People have seemed to have good luck with the Asus P5Q series boards. The X38/X48 are good chipsets, and Asus certainly isn't the only motherboard manufacturer. Others might be able to give you some more specific recommendations.

As for ram and operating systems. The 64-bit operating systems have plenty of support nowadays, especially Vista. I don't think you have to worry about driver conflicts too much. I always recommend G.Skill memory, because the quality is fantastic in my opinion, and the prices always seem right to me. G.Skill is usually pretty overclockable, and they usually have good reviews. More expensive offerings from OCZ, Kingston, Crucial, and Corsair are usually good overclockers as well. It really depends on the actually memory chips that the ram sticks are made from, of which there are many. Check the memory section for more info on that.

As for storage. There are many different RAID configurations that you can go with. Some will mirror the drives, which maintains the same space (i.e. two 300gb drives = 600gb), but the exact same data is written to both drives. This is great for backup or if you're paranoid about a drive failing. Another popular option is called striping. This will cause information to be written across both drives. So when data is read from the drives, it is taken from both simultaneously. This increases data throughput, which in some cases can speed up tasks on your computer (such as load times or file transfers). In this case, you will only see 300gb if you have two 300gb drives.

As for a graphics card, there are so many options its hard to recommend just one. So, I'm going to refrain from doing so.

Well I certainly appreciate your input, thank you. I've never had a drive to fail and the information I would put on it isn't ever a big concern to me anyway. The stuff I really want to keep I usually put on disk anyway, so that isn't a major concern to me. I've never owned an ASUS board, I was always an Abit person but they've went belly up and that isn't an option. I've looked over the DFI boards but I was trying to find something that would go along with the blue lights in the 900 and that is probably going to be a theme I stick with, so that is why I looked into the Extreme board.

I have a cheap system that I put Ultimate 64bit on and my WUSB12 wireless adapter wouldn't install...I backed up to 32bit but haven't tried it yet. It might just be out-dated and I can just forget about using it, no big issue. But I've been told that there wasn't a lot of support for 64bit stuff yet but I really wanted to use it. I'm still reading what I can find on that subject but it isn't even a major concern except for the amount of RAM I can use.

I will be happy if can hit 4ghz on that processor. I know how I am and once I do that and it's stable then I'll always think "what if" and wonder if it'll do more. But if I can hit 4ghz I'll be a happy little camper...even though I think I probably don't actually need 4 cores. I figure I might as well go ahead and buy it and have it if I ever were to need it. That is kinda the way I'm thinking about the I7 also, doesn't that have 8 cores? I don't need that either but I keep thinking about it but it's just too new right now and I don't see the point in going that route.

Just my opinion...if you are going to buy a $700 CPU & MB combo I'd go with i7. I think it may be a little late in the game for 775 to invest that much now.

If you aren't gaming much I'd get a 4850 or 9800GT. Those can be had for about $100. If you want to spend a little less on the GPU you could get a 9600GT or 4830 and still get pretty good performance.

For cheap fun overclocker with some gaming ability and will last a good long time

q9550 I saw you mentioned water cooling above. Lots of good advice in the WC forum, if you go air though, TRUE, Xigmatec 120mm are your best options. Spawne32 did an air overclocking roundup here and at ocpulse the TRUE is still among the top 5 air coolers, although there are better cheaper choices available.

2x2GB ram. High speed and low latency. 4-4-4 at 1000mhz would be ideal, tough to find in a 2x2 kit though.

p45 motherboard good overclocking and no more then 150 for the board, I would spend. P5q series is very popular, although, you have to set performance levels manually. If you leave them on auto, you will get great OCs, but the performance will just not be there as it will set it self to 11, 13 or even higher! (6-7 is ideal range lower is better of course) Look for ones with lots of VRMs for successful quad core overclocking.

Storage is going to be your bottleneck. I would get either 2x320GB WD single platter drives, or 2x640GB dual platter drives. At this price point you cant really get better without going to 10k or SSD. Running raid0 will really give a nice performacne boost depending on your usage of the PC. A sinlge drive alone will also run nicely. Mirroring as mentioned above, will give you data redundancy, however it was incorrectly mentioned that you double your space, this is not true. if you mirror 2x 320GB drives, you will have 320GB of usable space. Since the exact same data is written to both drives. Raid1 (mirror) will give you a nice boost in read speeds, but will give only the write performacne of a single drive. Raid0 (striping) boots read and write spped. All raid will cause a slight drop in access time.

Radeon 4830 video card. About $100 AMIR, almost as good as a 4850 (have not seen anything but futuremark benches, but many say it is as good as the 4850 until you crank up the res/AA) or grab a used 4850 off of ebay, they are selling cheap right now. OVerkill for your gaming needs now, but will allow you to play games for a while. If you have a low res monitor that you do not plan on upgrading, you can really skimp on the vid card. I would recommend either 512MB or better as 1GB card as they do make a differnce now in high res gaming, although as stated, your monitor decides this one.



Cheap p45 mobo AMIR Foxconn has really made its mark lately on appealing to high end users. This is not going to be the greatest overclocking board in the world, but it has 8CPU VRMs, runs up to 3 video cards... etc. DDL DTS audio is awesome. Do not think you can do better at this price point. p5q deluxe is a decent motherboard, but if you are going to spend that much might as well go all the way and get the maximusII or msi diamond (or look at x38/x48 motherboards) I cant see spending 200 on a mobo unless it does EVERYTHING i need with out needing to buy otherstuff (overclocking to me is a bout saving money buy budget and OC to make it an extreme system)


Lots of ram choices IF you do not mind rebates, patriot viper or the OCZ reapers are good, someone will have a mention of what is best I am sure, been a little while since I estimated RAM performance.

ax4830 Good OC potential, all 3 types of monitor connectors on one card (no need for adapters yah!), looks to have decent cooling and is only 80 amir.